This Time Might Be Different

by Elaine Ford

  She packs picnic lunches to bring with her to the cabin, sandwiches made from her own homemade bread, containers of different kinds of salads. Dana eats sparingly. He doesn’t care for meat. On the road he got used to doing without it, since it spoiled so fast, and now it’s too rich for him. Too much bread bloats him, he says. After their meals she tosses the leftovers onto the snow for the birds.

  Though he seldom drives into town, he talks about coming to church. But it would be too painful for her to sit in the choir, her face aflame under his gaze, and she asks him not to. “Don’t you fear for my soul?” he asks, kidding, and Carlene says his soul is his own problem. If he feels himself in danger of hellfire he can always go pray with the holy rollers in their Quonset hut on Back Bay Road—the Church of the Open Culvert, as he refers to it.

  When she’s not with him, Dana repairs the cabin and the outhouse, tramps in the woods. He tells her he longs for her when she’s gone. “Come live with me,” he says, and she’s not certain whether he’s serious. Come live with me and be my love. She imagines the gossip at the next soup luncheon if she were to tell Chalkie she’s going away for a while, hop in the pickup, and barrel off down the road to shack up with Dana Cox.

  Christmas passes quietly, without visits from their children, who are both spending the holiday with their in-laws. Carlene and Chalkie don’t stay up to welcome in the new century, but go to bed at their usual 10 p.m. “The world will still be there in the morning,” Chalkie says. “Or if it ain’t, we won’t be around to care.”

  There’s a blizzard in January that keeps her away from the cabin for a whole terrible week. Lent begins, and she makes love to Dana with a smudge of ash on her forehead. “Oh penitent one,” he says drowsily, his scratchy beard against her breast.

  “Not very penitent, I’m afraid.”

  He sags into sleep, his mouth agape. She studies his sinewy body, lightly traces the design of the tattooed butterfly. She thinks: I will care for you, Dana Cox. I will sustain you. It’s not like years ago, when you didn’t need me or anyone else.

  One afternoon she stops by the garage to speak to Chalkie. He’s in the cramped, messy little front office where they ring up gas sales and make out work orders and invoices, talking to Lucille Jarvis. Lucille is wearing a faded jacket that looks like it came from the extra-large rack in the Second Chance Thrift Shop. “Bad news,” she hears him tell her. “You got a stuck brake caliper. Left front wheel ain’t hardly turning, even on the lift.”

  “Oh, geez,” Lucille says. “Can you fix that?”

  “Sure I can fix it, but it’s gonna cost you.” Behind him, in the garage, some electric tool begins to shriek. He looks kindly at Lucille. “You want me to go ahead and order the parts?”

  Lucille shifts her weight from one foot to another, contemplating life without her car. She lives a mile from town, thirty miles from her job as a supermarket checkout clerk. “What choice do I have?”

  Carlene knows Chalkie’s going to let Lucille pay it off at a rate of fifteen or twenty dollars a month, without charging a dime of interest. Lucille’s old man is one of Chalkie’s Lodge brothers. Still, easy payments or no, Lucille will notice that twenty bucks. When she has gone, waddling down Main Street, Carlene says, “Jill called this morning. She’s going to have another baby. Due in August.”

  “Well, that’s fine.” Chalkie grins, more cheerful than he’s been in a while. The coverall zipped over his beachball-shaped middle has Chalkie embroidered in yellow thread on the pocket. As if there’s a single soul in western Washington County who doesn’t know who he is, Carlene thinks, who hasn’t at one time or another hauled in some crippled wreck for him to resuscitate.

  The days lengthen. When she turns off the pickup’s engine she can hear chickadees whistling their monotonous mating call in the woods. After lovemaking she and Dana walk to the granite ledge, now free of ice, and watch the waves slosh on the rock and smell the salt air. Sometimes they see a ship way off in the Gulf of Maine and guess where it might be heading. The Maritimes, the Azores, anywhere.

  One day early in April she drives into the clearing and sees all the blankets airing on lines stretched between trees. Dana’s sitting on the cinderblock stoop and she joins him. Sunlight finding its way between the spruce branches makes her squint.

  They talk about one thing and another and then he says, “So here’s the story, Carlene. I’m about through my stash.”

  She’s surprised. She’d assumed he had savings in a bank somewhere, at least enough to retire on in a modest way.

  “I’m going to have to find work,” he says.

  Carlene thinks about this. There’s the sea cucumber plant, but the task of extracting the edible parts from those disgusting creatures is so grubby and poorly paid only Mexicans and Hondurans will do it. She doubts the boats will be taking on many new hands this spring, and anyway, Dana doesn’t know a thing about fishing. Plus, he’s over sixty years old. She says, “I’m not sure any towns around here are ready for miniature golf.”

  He laughs. “True enough. I have to go where the work is. I think you should come with me.”

  Suddenly it’s not an idle romantic notion anymore: Come live with me and be my love. She can actually picture herself doing it, getting into his rusty red Honda and driving through town—past the library, the church, the Citgo station, the Clip ’n’ Curl, the pharmacy—for the last time. She wouldn’t take a thing with her besides the clothes on her back.

  “What about Chalkie?” she asks.

  “There must be any number of widows in town who’d be more than happy to take care of him. He might not even notice the difference.”

  Well, that’s a little hard on Chalkie, she thinks. He’d notice.

  Carlene feels the damp of the cinderblock seeping through her pants. A red squirrel chitters menacingly in a nearby tree. “When will you be going?” she asks.

  “Soon.”

  The next morning Carlene borrows the key from a cup hook on the sexton’s screened porch and goes into the church to pray. The sanctuary is unheated, empty. A few petals from last Sunday’s altar arrangement lie shriveled on the carpet. Absentmindedly she picks them up and puts them in her pocket.

  She sits in one of the rear pews and looks up at the altar. For some reason she remembers the evening a disheveled black man burst into the church when the choir was getting ready to rehearse. He’d planted himself there on the altar steps, haranguing them in the choir stall, referring to Scripture in a garbled way. “I’m passing through,” he told them. “People have reasons for why they leave places, many reasons, but they don’t know their destinations. Lot didn’t know. Noah didn’t know. Moses didn’t know. Nossir.” One of the tenors slipped a five-dollar bill into the man’s palm and escorted him to the door. Carlene wonders if he’s still wandering up and down the seacoast looking for handouts, or whatever it was he was looking for.

  She notices that the Pentecost banner with its dove cut out of felt, a Sunday School project a few years ago, hangs a little crookedly on the wall. Somebody ought to get out a stepladder and straighten that, she thinks. The ceiling has begun to peel, too. Soon the church ladies will be raising money to have the sanctuary repainted. Rummage sales, soup luncheons, quilt raffles, baked bean suppers . . .

  The clock in the steeple strikes nine, then quarter past, then nine-thirty. Rain begins to spatter the tall, half-shuttered windows.

  My last crack at true happiness, Lord. What shall I do?

  The weather turns raw, as raw as February, and the rain persists. Slicing vegetables for supper, she cuts her finger and bleeds in large bright drops on the linoleum. When he sees the bandage Chalkie asks what happened and she shrugs and says, “Nothing.” He doesn’t question her further. At night she lies beside him and doesn’t sleep. He’s so still she wonders if he isn’t sleeping, either. Maybe he’s begun to suffer from insomnia and never mentioned it, the
way he doesn’t talk about aches and pains, in case she’ll say, “You better see the doc about that.” During the days Carlene’s eyes burn with fatigue. Two weeks drag by. She doesn’t go out to see Dana. She hopes he’ll leave without her, is terrified that he will.

  After supper one night Carlene is patching the elbow of an old pullover of Chalkie’s that really belongs in the ragbag, but he refuses to part with it. Just breaking that in, he says, though the sweater must date from the Carter administration. The phone rings and Chalkie gets up to answer it. “I’ll tell her,” she hears him say out in the kitchen.

  He appears in the living-room doorway. “That was Mae Pomeroy. She wanted to know why you weren’t at the Fourth of July Cod Race Committee meeting.”

  “Oh, Lord. I completely forgot about that meeting.”

  “Carlene got another one of them headaches? she wanted to know.”

  Carlene removes some pins from the tomato-shaped pincushion that used to be her mother’s and begins to fit a patch over the hole. Bob aims himself at the sofa and leaps cautiously, his joints too creaky for high-flying maneuvers these days.

  “Do you?” Chalkie asks. “Do you have a headache?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  He sits in the easy chair and picks up his cigarette pack, then puts it down again. “You’re close as a clam with your words, Carlene.”

  “I’m sorry. I really don’t have anything to say.”

  He clears his throat. “Well, I have something.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “It’s been preying on my mind.”

  “Go ahead,” she says, imagining that he’s discovered carpenter ants in the woodwork or a leak in the attic roof. As if she’d care if the whole house fell to pieces around them.

  “End of November,” he begins, “Linwood Spinney brought his truck in for the state inspection.”

  Linwood Spinney? What’s he got to do with anything?

  “Thirtieth, must’ve been,” Chalkie says, “because I recall it was the last day he was legal. Not that that would’ve made a scrap of difference to ole Linwood. He does things when he’s good and ready.”

  “Like you,” she says, cutting off a length of thread and putting a knot in it.

  “I damn well care whether I’m legal or not.”

  Yes, she’ll grant him that. He may not enter a church from one end of the year to the other, except for weddings and funerals, but nobody in town is more respected for probity than Chalkie Hutchins.

  “Linwood’s truck passed inspection,” Chalkie continues, “and when I was filling in the form for the state, Linwood commenced to tell me about how a day or two previous he drove out to a cabin on Fiddlers Point, deliverin’ a load of lumber.” Chalkie pauses, fingering his pack of Luckies. “Saw the pickup parked there.”

  Carlene stares at him, the sweater limp in her lap.

  “Linwood figured I had some business with that Cox fella, didn’t want to barge in. Left the boards leaning against the woodpile and went back to town. A course, he was kinda curious to know what Dana Cox and Yours Truly were cooking up.”

  Numbly she asks, “What did you tell him?”

  “Well, Carlene, since it wasn’t me out there, I couldn’t tell him a thing.”

  For a long time she listens to rain tapping on the window, Bob licking his tough yellow coat. Suddenly, in her mind, she sees the wood stove, left to go cold, its door hanging open. She smells the acrid sodden ashes remaining inside. At last she says, “All these months. Why didn’t you say something?”

  He takes a cigarette out of the pack but doesn’t light it. “Seemed to me I’d better just let you get whatever it was out of your system. I couldn’t keep you here anyways, not if you wanted to go.”

  “Oh, Chalkie. You thought I might?”

  “I’ve always understood that, Carlene. I’m not quite as dim as you think.”

  He gets up and limps to the kitchen. She hears him take a match out of the canister by the stove, strike it, open the kitchen door and shut it again. Just as he’s done for the best part of four decades, he’ll lift his plaid wool jacket from a peg in the back hall and go out into the drizzle. Standing by the compost heap, smoking, he’ll ponder what seeds he’ll plant when the soil is dry enough to work.

  ORIGINAL BRASSES, FINE PATINA

  A bit chilly in the air-conditioning, Helen sits on a bench in the American wing and waits for Cal to arrive. She imagines he selected this particular gallery because it would be lightly visited on a Monday afternoon, not like the Hopper show, for which you have to pay an extra fee on top of the already expensive regular admission for the museum. Helen remembers when the museum was free, and she’d take the MTA here on Sunday afternoons to study objects covered in her art history survey or just to absorb the grace imparted by beautiful things. But nothing is ever really free. That year, and the next, had their costs in spite of her scholarship.

  When choosing the museum for a meeting place, Cal couldn’t have guessed that as a scared college freshman she’d lurked in these halls eyeing Greek and Roman sculptures, trying to figure out if Cal’s male member was within some kind of normal range, or if he was in fact the freak she feared. She hadn’t understood erections, that’s how naïve and uneducated—about things that actually counted—she’d been then. Daughter of a small-town schoolteacher, granddaughter of a potato farmer, the first in her family to go to a real college, far away from home. Before Cal, she’d never seen a man without his pants on.

  Freak or no, he’d succeeded in getting inside her stubborn little hole, and that’s why she’d given birth at Mt. Auburn Hospital the summer following her sophomore year.

  A young Asian couple pause in front of a portrait of a bewigged gentleman, clasp hands, move on to gaze at a mahogany tea table set with Staffordshire and silver, preserved behind glass.

  He’s late, but she might have expected that. Reluctant to meet her at all, not even very curious about her mission. With a name like Calvin Turnipseed he’d been a cinch to research on the internet; his email address took her but a few minutes to locate. She learned that he’d used his degree in chemical engineering to secure a career in industry, was now retired and serving on the boards of several charities, a Boston-based chamber music ensemble, and a hospital—not Mt. Auburn. Google turned up a group photo that included Mrs. Dolores Turnipseed, smirking for the camera at a benefit dinner. “I’ll be in town soon,” Helen had written Cal, “and wonder if you and I might get together.” No reply for more than two weeks. She assumed her message had been zapped in his electronic trash basket, but then he did write, apologizing for not answering right away. He’d been in Europe, he claimed. Yes, he could find time to meet and suggested the Museum of Fine Arts, the eighteenth-century gallery down at the far end of the American collection. Perhaps he’s had rendezvous here with other women, escaping Dolores, Helen thinks, and has already scouted out the territory. Dark rooms, sleepy guard.

  An old lady pushes another old lady in a wheelchair from one painting to the next, the women murmuring to one another. Is that how I’ll look to him? she wonders, aware of her own gray hair and creaky knees.

  When he appears in the doorway she’s taken aback; if the forty-seven years since they last saw each other haven’t been particularly kind to her, they’ve been even less kind to him. Liver spots splotch his bare scalp and cheeks. His face has a distinct pallor. The paunch he carries on his beanpole frame is of the approximate size and placement of a six-months pregnancy. She squelches a laugh. “Helen,” he says, moving toward her on the bench. Will he kiss her? A peck on the cheek, maybe? But no, he sits beside her and lays an oversized black umbrella between them. “Sorry to keep you waiting. My meeting ran late.”

  “I’m not in any great hurry.”

  “In Boston on vacation, did you say? Where do you live now, still Maine?”

  “I haven’t li
ved in Maine since I was a girl.”

  Cal nods but asks no further questions. He was never good at small talk, and anyway, he’s certainly no more interested in exchanging details about spouses and children and grandchildren, illustrated with wallet photos, than she is. The guard strolls past them, affording them hardly a glance. For all he knows they’re an old married couple: in any case, no obvious threat to the collection or to public decorum. Deciding she might as well come right to the point, Helen says, “I’ve heard from him. Our son.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Or from the agency, rather. He wants to find his birth parents, and the agency contacted me, to see if I was willing.”

  “But the records were sealed.”

  “Things have changed, Cal. Adoptees have rights, and they exercise them. What planet have you been living on?”

  After a pause he asks, “What are you going to do?”

  Although there’s no doubt in her mind that she’ll see her son—she’s already given the agency her go-ahead—something makes her wary now about revealing this to Cal, so soon in the conversation. “Some days I’m inclined one way, some days another.”

  Beside her Cal removes his glasses and digs at the inner corners of his eyes with his thumbs, a nervous gesture Helen remembers from all those years ago. Like her, he had an uncertain, vulnerable side then. Otherwise, she probably wouldn’t have fallen in love with him or let him do the things to her that he was bent on doing. But then what? No abortions other than the coat-hanger variety in those days. No marriage in the cards, either, not without money, not without love on his part—or more love than he could spare, anyhow. He had too many other fish to fry to consider acquiring a wife, raising a brat. To give him credit he did hang around in town that summer while she waited out the nine months, finding a shabby little sublet in Somerville for them to stay in. He’d go out in the middle of the night to buy her pints of peanut brickle ice cream, if that’s what she was craving.